It is attested in what appears to be two dialects,[1][2] based on word lists of about 250 lexical items, presumably collected around 1870–90.
In Walter William Skeat and Charles Otto Blagden's 1906 work "Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula",[3] the contents of three previously unpublished wordlists appear, two of which were collected by D.F.A.
[4] Hervey collected his Kenaboi lexicon in Alor Gajah, Malacca from speakers living in Gunung Dato',[5] which is a mountain situated in Rembau District, southern Negeri Sembilan.
Skeat and Blagden (1906) considers Kenaboi as an isolate unrelated to Austroasiatic and Austronesian.
[7] Other Southeast Asian languages with high proportions of unique vocabulary of possible isolate origin: